The most expensive mistake in proposal writing is starting too early. This guide covers the work that happens before the blank page: the documents a funder will actually check, how to establish what the problem really is, and how to research a donor properly.
PDF. Nothing to fill in, no email, no list. Print it and take it into a staff meeting.
Free
A call comes out. Someone forwards it to the group at nine in the evening. By morning a draft exists. It is confident. It names a community, a number of beneficiaries, a solution. Nobody has been to that community in two years. The registration certificate expired in March. The last audited account is three years old and shows a deficit nobody has explained.
The proposal will be rejected, and the organisation will never be told why. Readiness is not a mood. It is a set of facts that either exist or do not exist in a filing cabinet, in a community, and in a funder's published strategy. This guide is about establishing them.
The twelve documents a donor expects, and what goes wrong with each one. How to run a document audit in a morning. What due diligence actually examines after you have already won on merit. SWOT and PESTLE turned into proposal text rather than wall charts.
Why a needs assessment is not bureaucracy. Two real cases where the obvious intervention was the wrong one. The four stages, from ideation to a report somebody will read. How to judge secondary data. What to do when the deadline leaves no time for fieldwork.
What reviewers score and how the weights fall. What happens after shortlisting. Eleven funding sources that matter in Africa, with how to approach each. And how to position your proposal against everything else already being done in your geography.
An eighteen point organisational readiness checklist. A donor research template to complete before writing a word. And a ninety day plan that a three person organisation can run without funding.
You have real programmes and real relationships in the communities you serve. You have applied for funding and lost, or you are about to apply for the first time and you can feel that something is missing.
You do not need a fundraising department to use this. You need a notebook, two quiet afternoons, and the willingness to be honest about what your organisation cannot currently prove.
The guide is drawn from a longer book on proposal writing, and from years of writing, reviewing and watching proposals fail across Nigeria and West Africa.